Angus McCullough: Will Have Been

As space appears to shrink to a “global village” of telecommunications and a “spaceship earth” of economic and ecological interdependencies... and as time horizons shortento the point where the present is all there is… we have to learn how to cope with an overwhelming sense of compression of our spatial and temporal worlds.

-David Harvey, 1989

AA|LA is pleased to present Will Have Been, a solo exhibition by Angus McCullough. The exhibition considers standardized time, a sovereign territory that we are all subjected to but rarely question or consider as an historical construction. McCullough deconstructs linear time by teasing out its related systems—including grammar, transportation, and photography.

Drawn from McCullough’s own experiences with déjà vu, lucid dreams, grief, and personal growth, the works presented in the show are questions—not answers—manifested in drawings, poetry, multichannel video, and sculpture. Made from found material (both physical and digital), the work is created intuitively and accumulates on its own terms. The sculptures stand as things, collections, display structures, and artifacts of gesture. Some are taken apart and absorbed into other pieces in the series or disassembled entirely; they are constantly in flux.

This Was The Future, a multichannel digital video, interrogates synchronized time from a decidedly personal perspective, and documents its own creation. Human Standard Time, an interactive piece, connects a clock to a single participant’s heartbeat, harnessing "time" from an individual body. A collection of writing plays with grammar and narrative structures, and forms a link between all of the work. Will Have Been alludes to the future perfect tense—a predicted past—pointing to our ever-changing relationship to the present within a world of projected futures and increasingly condensed simultaneity.

Angus McCullough (b. 1988) was born in New York, NY and lives and works in Bennington, Vermont. Solo exhibitions include This Was the Future (St. Michael's College, Colchester, VT), Float (Keene State College, Keene, NH), Extracted from Nature (Salem Art Works, Salem, NY), Prototype (Buoy Gallery, Kittery, ME), and Humors (Bennington Museum, Bennington, VT). He has shown at The Bronx Museum (Bronx, NY), Roman Susan (Chicago, IL), ACRE (Chicago, IL), Vernon Gardens (Los Angeles, CA), and The Lust Gallery (Vienna, A). Will Have Been is his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles.